Brandon Shopp, vice president of product strategy for security at SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI), has said agencies should look at user education and cross-team collaboration as key elements of their strategies to protect networks from cyber attacks amid the increasing adoption of mobile devices and cloud platforms.
Shopp wrote that agencies should educate their staff and other end users through phishing attack simulations and other exercises to determine if their employees implement best practices.
Education needs to be an ongoing commitment. The types of attacks and tactics adversaries use are constantly changing and evolving, and agencies shouldnt let employees become complacent and revert to old behaviors, he added.
When it comes to cross-team collaboration, Shopp called on agencies to have a single security operations center manned with individuals from security, system and network teams.
Encouraging that level of collaboration allows agencies to more quickly identify the root cause of a problem and resolve it, he added.
Shopp also cited how cloud access security brokers, behavioral analytics and tools that offer visibility into on-premises infrastructure, mobile and cloud environments could support agencies network defense initiatives.